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Josef Prusa (and his brother), a few iPhone 3G-loving Czechs, have figured out how to control their RC car with their iPhone's accelerometer. The 5+ minute video shows Josef wheeling and spinning his RC car simply by tilting the iPhone.

Controlling is very easy with iPhone 3G. You have five buttons, four of them you can use for traditional "driving" and when you press last one, unlocks accelerometer control in same way as you can see in many driving games available on AppStore.

Realization of this project not took long time, only one afternoon.

Basically, he's interfacing the iPhone 3G with OSCemote (link opens iTunes), which is available for $4.99 in the AppStore and sends Open Sound Control messages to a PC on his network. The PC catches the data using Max/MSP. Max/MSP then exports to an Arduino, which is a small development kit that, in turn, by use of transistors, makes the adjustments on the actual RC controller. Some nifty engineering mods for an afternoon's work.